Calling all agents, where are you?

We believe the next step in the application of agent technology to the Internet is the massive population of the Internet with software agents functioning in a wide range of capacities: information filtering, information brokering, commerce, negotiation, and so on. In such an environment, a means to effectively locate relevant agents for relevant tasks is indispensable. We examine issues in the design and implementation of a 'directory agent' that stores meta-information of other agents. In particular, we present results from our work on building a scalable directory agent for a large scale, distributed agent based e-commerce system (the ABECOS project).